How to Reduce the Download Time of Web Clip Art

Clip art images are usually the parts of a website that take the longest to download. Therefore, it is important to take measures to improve your visitors' experience in viewing your site by decreasing the download time necessary to display each page.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Photo-editing program

Decrease Time Needed to Download Web Clip Art

1. Reduce the number of colors, known as the bit-depth, in all clip art GIF files. The bit-depth controls the number of colors that are available in the graphic's palette. The lower the number, the smaller the file size.

2. Crop the clip art image to remove any extraneous portions. The dimensions for height and width of an image also affect the size of the file. If any areas of the image are not needed, get rid of them.

3. Incorporate "thumbnails" or smaller versions of your clip art into your site, linking them to the larger versions on separate pages. Thumbnails are especially helpful when it is necessary to use many images on the same page, such as in a photo gallery. This gives visitors the option of whether or not to load each image for a full view.

4. Divide large clip art images into smaller web images. This allows each smaller image to load individually, giving visitors with slower Internet connections an idea of how the overall image is going to look. This method should be used only in cases of very large web images, as it may actually increase the size of the overall page.

5. Reduce images in a photo-editing program, like Photoshop, rather than using HTML code to scale it down. The problem with using code to reduce the size is it only decreases the size of the image's appearance on the page, not the size of the file. The image will still take the same amount of time to load.

Tips & Warnings

• The use of recurring logos and icons throughout your website can help create a consistent look. Also, reusing the same image files helps reduce download times because each file only needs to be downloaded once to be viewed on any page, regardless of the number of times it appears.
• Don't use more than a few clip art graphics and image files. While images can help enhance your site, too many may frustrate your visitors and discourage them from coming back. Use text to communicate your messages whenever possible.